In a world without hope there is a light…

Archive for the ‘Christian Life’ Category

I was wondering the other day about gifts; we give and receive gifts a various times, Christmas, birthdays and the like and I got to wondering what it is that makes a gift, a gift.

Now that may seem quite obvious, if we give something to somebody else then it is a gift, but I have to ask, is it? If I go into a shop and say to the shop keeper “please may I have a pack of AA batteries please” the shop keeper will most likely hand me the pack of batteries and reply “that will be £2.99 please”. Now you could argue that the shop keep has given me some batteries, a gift, but I doubt that you would, I imagine you will be saying that I had bought the batteries because I paid for them. So here I think we have the first principle of a gift; a gift is one sided affair, it is given without expectation of anything in return.

First principle: a gift is given without expectation of anything in return.

Now let’s consider another aspect of the giving of gifts. If I was given a carrot and told that I must feed it to my donkey would this still be a gift? It certainly passes the first test as there is no mention of any expectation of something in return but it still somehow feels as if it is lacking something, and I think that something is freedom. What I mean by freedom is the idea that once a gift has passed from the one giving to the one receiving then the gift should be free from any constraint, when the giver specifies its use the gift becomes entangled in strings and is no longer free. Don’t get me wrong I can see why we put these constraints on gifts, we often feel that the recipient won’t make good decisions about how to use the gift and as such we ‘help’ them to use it wisely. But adding all those strings takes something away from the gift that to me makes it less of a gift so I think it good for true gifts to be free.

Second principle: a gift should be free of strings, the recipient makes the choices.

So we have an idea of what makes a gift, a gift, and that got me thinking again about gifts that I have given and received over the years and how often these have, or have not, been a true gift. How often do we give because we have received, sort of the reverse of the first principle, but if we are honest it is really the first principle. How often have we said “that’s the last time I give them a gift, they didn’t even say thankyou”, which whilst it is nice to receive a thankyou that isn’t really the essence of the gift.

It’s shortly after Easter as I write this and my children have received Easter eggs from various people and I am fairly certain that they were true gifts, but Easter isn’t really about chocolate eggs, as much as they are quite tasty, it’s about a gift that matches all of the criteria above. Jesus willingly, of His own free will, without us deserving, without expectation of a reciprocal gift, without compulsion to act in a certain way, gave up His place in heaven, came to earth as a man and paid the price that we could not pay to give us the give of everlasting life with Him in heaven. Now you might say that Jesus expects us to worship Him in return for this gift, but for me that is the wrong way of looking at it. The right way of looking at it is that we choose to worship Him because of His unbounded love for us, it is our response to His gift and not His expectation of us in giving the Gift.

Third principle: It is for the recipient of a gift to choose to express joy and thanks and not the giver to demand it.

As recipients of gifts is it not joyous to respond with a thankful heart? Of course it is, but it is the recipient of the gift who expresses this and not the giver who demands it, this is my third and final principle.

Inertia to an engineer it can be fundamental to what they are doing and can be troublesome if there is too much or indeed too little, to an organisation it can be the difference between never getting going or becoming an unstoppable machine, but what is this thing we call inertia.

I was once in a restauraunt when one of the people I was with had a bowl of soup, the soup bowl was also on a plate. They rotated the plate intending to rotate the soup bowl but the only thing that rotated with any significance was the plate, the bowl barely moved. They exclaimed ‘Why?’, my response ‘inertia’. Now this is a simple and trivial example but it does offer quite a nice introduction to the subject.

If we are first take a look at what we have and what would be required for the bowl to rotate. We start with the plate a rest and we know from Newton’s first law of motion that basically states that a body, or a plate, will remain at a constant velocity, and we need to remember that stationary is a constant velocity of zero, unless an external force is applied. We have a plate that is stationary, has zero velocity, and has a rotational force imparted by the person’s hand causing it to change its velocity. We have one small problem with this in that we haven’t defined a mechanism of transferring the force available from the person’s hand to the plate but clearly there is one and it is one that were are all familiar with and that mechanism is known as friction. Whilst we might not all realise it we are all familiar with friction, it’s the force that stops us falling over when we walk along a pavement and often in the winter the presence of ice often reduces the friction, when that happens we can often end up in the horizontal rather than the vertical. Now that we can associate the word friction with what we know happens in our everyday lives we can be confident that we can generate enough friction between our fingers and a plate to impart a force large enough to rotate it so we can leave that part and from now on just be happy that the hand rotated the plate. Having said that it is worth mentioning that there is also a frictional force between the plate and the table but that it is sufficiently small that it doesn’t prevent our rotation of the plate so we won’t dwell on it.

So we have a rotating plate and on that plate is a bowl and there was clearly an expectation that the bowl would rotate, so that must be part of our everyday experience also, but I think it is worth just a little thought of how that may work. In the same way that we needed friction between our hand and the plate to impart a force we also need a frictional force between the plate and the bowl otherwise there isn’t a force to cause the bowl to move and we know that we need a force to change its velocity. Now you might think that we have the answer as to why the bowl didn’t rotate, there wasn’t enough friction, but we haven’t mentioned the word inertia once so why was my answer inertia?

Well inertia really is the answer as to why the level of friction available wasn’t enough. Now I didn’t tell you this earlier but if the plate had been rotated slowly and the speed gradually increased the bowl would also have started to rotate. Did the level of friction change? Well I can answer that with a resounding no, the force available from friction is determined by the force pushing the two surfaces together, the weight of the soup and bowl, and the nature of the surfaces, which don’t change regardless of the speed with which the plate is initially rotated, within limits I might add but within the bounds of what would be reasonable for a person there is no change. So if the friction didn’t change why would the bowl rotate if the rotation started slowly and the answer is inertia.

So inertia will allow something to be rotated, or moved, if it is done gently but not if it is done more vigorously? Well sort of, inertia is basically a body’s resistance to a change in its velocity, so something with a high inertia doesn’t want to change velocity, or speed if you like, so you have to push it harder to make it do it, something with a low inertia is quite happy to change and doesn’t require much force. So why will our bowl, that seemingly has a high inertia because it stays still when the plate it rotated, change its speed if rotated slowly? Well it was a bit of a deception on my part and in the human mind, the bowl will actually start to rotate at the same rate regardless of whether we start to spin the plate fast or slow, but our expectations are different. When we spin the plate fast we expect the bowl to stay in sync with the plate which it doesn’t, but when we rotate the plate slowly we have the same expectation and this time it is met, the bowl stays in sync with the plate.

Now you might now be thinking OK but as the title states why should we care, because let’s face it, it doesn’t really matter whether your bowl of soup stays in sync with your plate if you so happen to spin your plate. Well for me there are two reasons, one is all to do with motors and one is to do with expectations with regard to people.

I’ll tackle the motors question first. At Cornfield we are often required to design a system that can move something arround and move it in a very specific way. To cause something to move on an item of industrial machinery, which after all is what we are working with, requires the impartation of a force, remember Newton’s first law, to cause a… you get the gist. Now for industrial machinery there are two main ways of imparting a force, one is a pneumatic actuator where we use compressed air acting on an area to provide a force, such as a pneumatic cylinder, or an electric motor where we use electricity to create a set of magnetic fields that are setup to repel each other causing a shaft to rotate. Now to create rapid, controller precise movements motors are good and a particular class of motor, along with its associated controller, is very good and these are called servo motors.

As you have probably guessed these motors come in various sizes from little ones that are about as big as a mug up to large ones that are as big as your dustbin. It is important to select the correct one, too small and you won’t be able to do what you want, you either don’t have enough force to move the piece of mechanics you want to move or you don’t have enough force to control the piece of mechanics, either situation is not good. However, select one too big and you will pay extra for the motor and the controller, and these things aren’t cheap, you will have to fit more physical bulk into your machine, which is often more difficult than you might think, and you will use more electricity than necessary giving higher energy bills and contributing to climate change over the life of the machine. Cornfield are a systems partner for a company called Lenze who manufacture this type of kit and they have a principle that they call ‘Right Sizing’ which in essence means selecting the components that are just big enough for the task, not too big, not too small but the right size.

Now the second reason why we should care is to do with people in organisations, for me that is Hope Community Church, organisations have inertia and it is a product of the people within the organisation. An organisation that has a large inertia requires a larger effort to cause a change in direction than one with a smaller inertia, so when contemplating change for an organisation it is important to understand its inertia characteristic, and use the appropriate level of force over the appropriate level of time. Just like with mechanical systems if you apply too greater force, because of a desire to change direction quickly, you can break the very thing you are trying to move. Also if you apply a force that is small enough not to break the organisation but don’t apply it for long enough you will not effect a sufficient change. The principle of right sizing is useful to organisations as much as mechanical systems, apply the right force for the right amount to change for the best outcome.

The trick is to come up with the right levels of force and time, when dealing with a mechanical system there are nice formulas that can be used to nail down some of the variables. With an organisation this is more difficult, but at Hope we have God that is big enough to work this our, our job is to trust His judgement and act upon His instruction, which we gain through reading His word, the Bible, and praying, both of which align us to His will for our lives and His church.

I was reading an article the other day that talked about victimless crime, or at least what the population at large consider to be victimless crime and it got me thinking about why people may consider some crime to be victimless and as such justify its undertaking or a least consider it less serious.

why people may consider some crime to be victimless?

In case you were wondering what might be considered victimless crime let me give you a few examples;

You go to a hole in the wall to get out some cash, you ask for £20 and if dispenses £40. If you take the money and not report it is that a crime and if so is it victimless?

Extended the one above a bit more, you hear that a cash machine is dispensing twice as much as it should, so you join the long queue to get some ‘free’ money and subsequently withdraw the maximum amount. A crime? Victimless?

When claiming your mileage expenses at work you list two trips as separate even though you managed to go from one to the other, your real mileage was say 50 miles but you claim the total miles if you had returned to base of 80 miles. Who is harmed?

Very often if the victim is big business or the government we often consider them not to be genuine victims as they are big enough to stand it, but my question really is does it matter whether an individual or a company can ‘stand it’, if it’s not yours why take it? Is a crime only a crime if it directly harms an individual?

does it matter whether an individual or a company can ‘stand it’?

My own answer to those question is that firstly if there is a law that say’s you shouldn’t do something that has a very high weighting, and if you don’t like the law you should lobby to get it changed by using any and all means that are within the law. You’ll notice that I don’t have an absolute in the law, this is simply for a case where a law is so unjust, corrupt or violates our core beliefs that we are unable to follow it, not that I am advocating seeking out laws we don’t like and deliberately breaking them but when one presses itself into us we need to consider more. I haven’t personally had any law in the UK pressed into me that I have felt the need to break it, not that I can claim I keep within the law but I have no justification for the times that I do break the law.

the important thing there is perspective.

Secondly I believe that whether the victim is a company that makes its money by breaking many laws across many nations or the little old lady down the road they are all capable of being victims and more importantly we are perpetrators. The important thing there is perspective, if we have a perspective of whether the victim suffers or not is the wrong perspective, our perspective should be one of our own behaviour towards others, does what we do build society or break it down.

As a Christian I read in the Bible of an occasion where Jesus was asked about paying taxes, the theory being that He would so no as the taxes were paid to the Roman occupiers, but Jesus tells them to pay their taxes. There is another occasion where Paul is advising the Christian community in Rome about whether they should obey the authorities or not, in essence should they abide by the laws of the land. Paul very clearly states that they should and give a clear reasoning as to why that is the case, Paul even goes beyond obeying the law but that is probably for another time.

but Jesus tells them to pay their taxes.

As you can see this is just a few quick thoughts but I am interested in what everybody else thinks, so please leave a comment about what your thoughts are, the only thing I ask is that you say why they are your thoughts so we can form an understanding and not just gather information.

It was a few weeks ago now when God impressed on my heart the words ‘Go and Sin no More’. At first I thought what have I done that is so bad that God would be specifically telling me to go and sin no more, what at this time is so wrong that God has decided that I need a special kick up the bum? (more…)